Thursday, March 25, 2010

You want the truth!?

I was front row centre at the Ann Coulter "protest" on Tuesday night so I want to clear up a few misconceptions about what happened.

First, barring posters to advertise the event on campus created a lot of confusion and that decision was a big blunder by the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO). Most people had learned about the Coulter event only a few days prior from the mainstream media. We had no idea that we needed to pre-register online to attend.

The U of O Campus Conservatives who organized the event did a very poor job. They were close to an hour behind schedule before they announced to the large crowd of then-agitated students that if we weren't registered, we weren't getting in. It was chaos when frustrated fans and critics of Coulter were then penned inside the building, the organizers were blocking entry into Marion Hall and the large crowd outside made it to difficult to leave.

It's sad that Coulter and Ezra Levant will go around trumpeting this as some free speech disaster when the truth is that this event was cancelled due to extremely poor planning by the organizers, some idiotic decisions by the SFUO and some prankster pulling a fire alarm.

Alex Sellick,

Ottawa

By way of rebuttal, Ezra Levant promised to track down where Mr. Sellick lives, and sue his ass off. Or something like that.